London has been battered by 50mph winds that have felled trees and caused travel chaos. Powerful gusts swept across the capital as the Met Office issued a yellow "be aware" weather alert for most of the country.

The Chancellor, George Osborne, was in combative form for today’s Autumn Statement — but he had a good deal to be defensive about. The Government will miss its target for reducing debt by 2016 and the economy will shrink by 0.1 per cent this year, growing by just 1.2 per cent in 2013.

The Statement reaffirms, as Mr Osborne put it, that the Government is “confronting the country’s problems, instead of ducking them” and he robustly repudiated Labour’s prescription for increased borrowing as “the road to ruin”. But the interest today is in how the austerity is shared out. Much of the burden is to fall on welfare spending cuts over three years: most benefits for working-age people will rise by just one per cent, an effective cut. Housing benefit is being squeezed, as are jobseeker’s allowance and income support. But Mr Osborne did not present these as merely a way to cut the deficit so much as a drive towards a fairer welfare system.

So, tax cuts are to be directed at lower and middle-income earners, though more people — about 400,000 — will come into the higher-rate tax bands. But increasing numbers of lower earners will be taken out of tax altogether by raising tax thresholds.

One critical element of the Statement was the extent to which it spread the burden of austerity to include rich as well as poor. There will be no means testing of benefits for older people such as winter fuel payments — and indeed means testing is cumbersome. As expected, there will be no mansion tax on higher-value homes, a Liberal Democrat demand. But there will be a cap on tax relief on pension contributions by the rich: the amount higher earners can save, tax free, in pension schemes will fall to around £40,000 a year. That may raise as much as £1 billion.

With the limited room for manoeuvre available to him, Mr Osborne tried to make the Statement — a Budget in all but name — a programme for growth as well as cuts. He is directing £12 billion towards tax cuts for business and infrastructure spending. Corporation tax falls by a penny in 2014, which, as Mr Osborne says, will be the lowest rate in any advanced economy. That should increase the country’s attractiveness to investors. Small business rate relief is being extended by another year. There is to be a fuel duty freeze. And there will be yet another bid to ease lending for companies: £1.5 billion is to go towards this and guarantees for loans.

The Chancellor mooted some interesting reforms today. He raised the prospect of doing away with national pay rates for teachers, a good move which would benefit those living in London. And he outlines overdue changes to the Private Finance Initiative method of funding for public projects, which has proved far too favourable to private contractors.

Mr Osborne has picked up on popular indignation about egregious if legal tax avoidance by big international corporations and the rich by giving the Treasury £77 million to target actual abuse. That should be popular.

Overall, this Statement is a bid to make the most of a bad situation. The outlook remains as bleak as the winter; now Mr Osborne must hope that this time his forecasts hold, and that his strategy delivers growth as well as fiscal restraint.

Winter, again

Will there ever come a time when it dawns on our airports, and indeed some local authorities, that snow in winter is not an unheard-of occurrence but something that happens in Britain every few years? Today both Stansted and Luton airports closed runways on account of snow, inconveniencing passengers and airlines. Yet we learned some time ago that this winter would be severe. Snow happens. Let’s try and cope with it.